Arts & Events

On March 4, Canadian mezzo-soprano Simone McIntosh gave a mesmerising performance of the song-cycle Harawi by French composer Olivier Messiaen as part of the second Schwabacher Recital of 2020 in the Taube Atrium Theatre in San Francisco. Readers may check out my review of this recital in the March 7 online issue of Berkeley Daily Planet. This event was of such impact and importance in our Bay Area musical life that I decided to follow up by engaging Simone McIntosh in a dialogue about Messiaen’s Harawi. Due to the Shelter in Place restrictions imposed, however, due to the coronavirus, my dialogue with Simone McIntosh had to be online through email. Here, with few revisions, are the results of our online dialogue. 

James MacBean I read in an interview you gave in Canada that you first encountered Messiaen’s Harawi in 2015 in Toronto in some kind of mash-up with Franz Schubert’s Die Schöne Müllerin. That must have been a strange way to make one’s first encounter with Messiaen’s Harawi, so I’m wondering what was it about Messiaen’s Harawi that jumped out to you and made you want to sing this work? 

Simone McIntosh: Yes, it was a mash-up of Schubert and Messiaen. But it was very well sung by mezzo-soprano Kristina Szabo, and the music by Messiaen totally captivated me. I had never heard anything like it! So from that moment on I’ve wanted to sing that amazing music, though of course I’ve also continued singing many other works by classical and contemporary composers. 

James MacBean: Harawi is written for soprano and piano. You’re a mezzo-soprano, albeit one with an extraordinary vocal range. In your San Francisco performance, did you sing Harawi as it was written for soprano, or did you transpose certain passages down to suit your mezzo-soprano voice? 

Simone McIntosh: Messiaen was definitely unrelenting towards both the singer and the pianist in this work. For the singer it requires her to maintain a high B while equally feeling at home in the lower register. It was originally written for a dramatic soprano, but lucky for us lyric mezzos we can also lay claim to this work. It might better be described as a piece written for a zwischen (voice between mezzo and soprano). Transposition to Messiaen is decidedly a big “No, No.” Especially because of his synesthesia, transposition would change the entire coloration of the piece. 

James MacBean: Your performance in San Francisco was mesmerising! As I wrote in my review, you seemed to inhabit the music. Or, to put it another way, the music seemed to inhabit you. In each of the twelve songs, you moved in a different way. You gesticulated, you knelt, and you danced. Did Messiaen’s synesthesia, i.e, the ability to experience in one sensory faculty a stimulus in another sense faculty, encourage you to explore a visual complement to each musical stimulus? 

Simone McIntosh: Thank you for your incredible compliment! I felt that in order to effectively portray this piece there had to be storytelling through a whole body experience; and we were greatly influenced by colour throughout this work. The idea of synesthesia also gave me the idea of wearing all-white. I wanted to symbolise the fact that Harawi uses the whole spectrum of colours, while also allowing the audience to experience a blank canvas that enables them to interpret the performance in their own way. 

James MacBean: Can you give an example of how the combination of words and music in a particular song suggested to you the kind of movement that would work? 

Simone McIntosh: In the fourth song, “Doundou tchil,” Messiaen said in his notes to singers that this song represented a lover courting his or her beloved through dance, and that the made-up words “doundou tchil” represented the sound of little bells encircling the dancer’s ankles. So that inspired me to perform a dance, and to go around behind the piano in a circular movement as in the words in Messiaen’s text, “la danse des étoiles” (“the dance of the stars”). 

James MacBean: The verbal exoticism of Harawi is very strong. The poetic text, written by Messiaen himself, is full of surrealist juxtapositions, devoid of normal grammar and syntax. Then too there is the imitation of Quechuan language, plus the nonsense syllables of birdsong. 

Moreover, Messiaen’s rhythms are irregular and exotic, based on the talas of Hindu music in India. It must be a monstrously difficult text to memorise, much less to sing. How did you manage it? 

Simone McIntosh: I can’t say it was the easiest piece I’ve done in my life! Memorising such a disjunctive text was especially difficult! But it’s such a beautifully evocative text! So I felt it was well worth my effort.  

James MacBean: Messiaen’s music is usually quite mystical and Catholic. Harawi seems to stand a bit outside his usual intellectual sphere, although it brings together his interest in ethnomusicology, love of nature, and birdsong. In Harawi, an hour-long song-cycle for piano and vocalist, and in other of his earlier works, such as, for example, Quatuor pour la fin du temps/Quartet for the end of time, Messiaen thrives on utilising minimal resources. However, in Messiaen’s later works he tended towards the grandiose. In his Turangalila Symphony, which follows Harawi as the second part of his Tristan trilogy, Messiaen goes overboard in mounting a grandiose work for large orchestra plus Ondes Martenot, an electronic instrument producing ethereal sound waves. Messiaen discusses Turangalila Symphony in terms of Hindu thought. He uses the Sanskrit words “Turanga” and “lila” to suggest divine play in the cosmic order and the passage of love through time. As I wrote in a review for Berkeley Barb of the 1975 performance of Turangalila Symphony by San Francisco Symphony, “Like Wagner, (whose influence is easily heard in Turangalila), Messiaen attributes all sorts of esoteric and mystical meanings to various musical themes and their modifications. Also like Wagner, Messiaen sometimes comes off sounding like a cosmic con-man.” Do you find that in Harawi, at least, if not elsewhere in his work, Messiaen avoids going overboard in a grandiose mystical direction?  

Simone McIntosh: I love that insight! I am hugely biased towards Harawi; and I feel that in this song-cycle he created a visionary story about love and death, which, though it had affinities with Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, was very much Messiaen’s own view and avoided going overboard in a mystical direction, unless one considers a feeling for the oneness of all nature as mysticism.  

James MacBean: I’d like to ask about your collaboration with pianist Robert Mollicone for the San Francisco performance of Harawi. You had previously performed this song-cycle in Canada with pianist Rachael Kerr. How was it different this time performing with Robert Mollicone?  

Simone McIntosh: I’ve been so fortunate to have worked with two incredibly talented, skilled, and hardworking pianists on Harawi. It’s such a demanding piece for pianists as well as for singers! When I began working with Bob Mollicone on Harawi it became clear in the first twenty minutes that this would be quite different from what I did with Rachael Kerr. Harawi allows the pianist to bring out his/her individual artistry and interpretation of the work, and I found this both surprising and immensely rewarding. 

James MacBean: Finally, as memorable as was your performance of Harawi, I don’t want to leave readers with the impression that you are a Messiaen specialist. You’ve sung a great variety of roles, including the title role in Rossini’s La Cenerentola. And of course, you’re well-suited to sing many of Mozart’s mezzo-soprano roles. What’s it like for you to move from century-to-century in music history? And what can we look forward to hearing you sing in the future? 

Simone McIntosh: I love singing Messiaen, new music (especially by Canadian composers), and music of the Second Viennese School (Berg and Schoenberg). I guess I love music that is ridiculously hard! But I also love singing music from all periods. I do a lot of Mozart, Rossini, and Richard Strauss. Like all mezzos, I get lots of pants roles. To be able to sing Messiaen one night, and Handel the next, and to be just as passionate about one as the other is truly wonderful! Music is wonderful that way! As for the future, it’s a bit on hold for now due to coronavirus. I’ve had to cancel performances of Fauré and Respighi with the San Francisco Chamber Music Society, originally scheduled for April. Meanwhile, I urge your readers to support musicians whose livelihood is at risk by donating to organisations like Artist Relief Tree. The arts will always persevere!